I know I’m late in mentioning this but I was reading Brian’s (3Fs) post on him buying a new home with a lot of interest. It was posted last week but I found the timing interesting because my wife and I are thinking about buying a new home in the next few years.
Given that we just repriced our housing loan for a lower interest rate, we will be locked in for the next 2 years. Which works for us since we might be able to squeeze into our 2 bedroom apartment with a baby for a while but it’s not a long term solution. Especially if we want to have another kid and the helper living with us.
The considerations Brian outlined in his post are similar to the factors we are looking at too. Since he has done such a good job at summarising them, I’m going to write my post as a response to applying the questions to our situation.
We plan to buy a bigger 3 or 4 bedroom apartment in the next few years. We are still unsure about the timing because we have to see how the living arrangements with the baby, confinement nanny and helper work out first. This is using a combination of our 2 bedroom apartment and the spare room in my parents-in-law’s place.
We are not keen on owning more than 1 property in Singapore. But having to time the sale of our current property and purchase of a new property to avoid the ABSD can be a real problem. While decoupling (at the cost of incurring stamp duty) can help to solve this issue, we are not interested in renting out the 1st property and staying in the 2nd property.
The Singapore rental market is weak and I know we won’t like dealing with tenants. We already have to deal with difficult people in the corporate world to earn our salary income. Can’t imagine having to do the same to earn rental income. Not worth it unless we get good tenants, which is increasingly tough the way I see people behave nowadays.
We are not planning to rent first because it makes no sense for us to do it here in our home country unless we have no choice. We already rented for a number of years when living in Australia and that’s because it served the purpose of allowing us to study and work in Melbourne & Sydney.
We like having facilities such as the swimming pool, gym, bbq pit, convenient indoor carparking. So probably not a HDB. The new private condos are too small so it’s likely to be a resale private condo that is bigger. No preference on interior finishing since we should be renovating the apartment. Proximity to MRT is important because we prefer taking the train in to work rather than driving. Proximity to a good primary school is less important for now since we are only just having our first kid.
Mid to high floor 3 or 4 bedroom freehold apartment with a squarish layout, decent living room & bedrooms and in Districts 14 to 16 (close to my parents-in-law’s place) would be good. Actually, we have already done some viewings and the few apartments that we liked and met our requirements are priced above S$2 million.
A steep price to pay as the economy softens and the job market weakens. This in turn increases our retrenchment risks. Getting caught out with a big mortgage, no job and newborns/young kids would be disastrous. Things like that happen easily enough when you lose your job, make a wrong move in your career, experience a medical emergency, etc. Which is why we are holding off on this new property purchase for now until we get more clarity on what’s going to happen to our jobs.